Posted Toronto Political Panel: Taking survey of the city

Look! A survey. The City of Toronto wants to know what you think. Or not. Chris Selley, Jonathan Goldsbie, and Matt Gurney discuss whether the Service Review consultations are a useful exercise in civic engagement or merely a show trial preceding an inevitable execution of City programs.

Selley: Having been a bit out of the City Hall loop since the federal election campaign began, I figured I’d get back into it with the much-ballyhooed service review. Which is, I think, a great idea in principle. Setting aside the fact Rob Ford promised not to cut any services — ancient history, I know — I’m all for polling the electorate on what services they consider essential, unnecessary, and in between, and what they think about privatizing the delivery of those services. Sadly, the whole thing almost instantly deflates into pear-shaped incoherence The survey proposes to ask me which services are important, and then to ask “who you think should provide each service.” But five of the services, or 15%, are described in terms of who runs them! Do I think “city-run live theatres” are important, for example? And if so, who do I think should run the city-run theatres? Um … no comment. And why am I being asked to weigh in on “recreation and community centres,” “community-run community centres” and “community-run ice rinks and arenas”? Can anything useful come out of anything so sloppily conceived? (I’m really asking.)

Goldsbie: And then, of course, there are the parts that cluelessly inquire as to whether you believe the City should violate the provincial laws that regulate library and police services. For the most part, the survey is a reflection of the Ford administration’s governance-by-gut approach: with a large, complex city to run, the value of individual elements is intuited rather than investigated. I personally found the Service Review public consultation I attended at City Hall to be a far more rewarding experience than the online survey; the people at my table were inquisitive, and staff were on hand to provide answers about both the services being evaluated and the process and meaning of the evaluation itself. At the end, however, and under intense yet polite grilling from my friend Dave Meslin, City staff admitted that the public feedback would not have an influence on staff’s recommendations to Council; rather, a package summarizing public sentiment will be presented to councillors alongside the City Manager’s report. So here’s what tends to be happen in these situations: if the public comments jibe with the staff recommendations, they will use this to justify and support the actions they were already planning to undertake; if the public comments are at odds with the staff recommendations, they will coldly remind us that the word “consultation” implies no obligation to pay heed.

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Gurney: That’s so weird. I actually fully agree with JG. Such public consultations are only really useful to the government of the day if they end up giving cover to whatever the administration does. They’ll never generate enough opposition to change any minds, either, as the groups will be too small and self-selecting, and thus easy to ignore. That’s why I’m not surprised the questions are as ham-fisted as Chris reports. The administration isn’t really seeking reliable information. Just political cover.

Selley: Well, I’m not sure how much “political cover” it’s going to provide. If Ford jacks up property taxes and user fees by X% to balance the budget, or cuts Y number of services that people consider important, or allows those services to deteriorate by Z%, there’s an unknown point at which many of his supporters will simply jump ship. Saying “but look here, a majority of your fellow citizens agree with what I’m doing” isn’t going to help. Saying “I never promised not to raise your property taxes” isn’t going to help. You can’t bolster a populist, anti-elite uprising with facts and statistics after the fact. Which could make the whole exercise even more useless. That said, if the review engaged formerly unengaged people in municipal politics, then the disappointment might inform a more intelligent uprising in the future.

Goldsbie: The problem began with the timeline for the Service Review program, which the initial staff report described as “very ambitious,” in order to meet an arbitrary January deadline for passing the 2012 budget. Such “aggressive time lines” (as they are described elsewhere in the report) meant that serious integration of public input was never a real possibility. So, despite the enthusiasm and helpfulness of the consultation staff, this was always going to be a tokenistic exercise. That said, I do encourage everyone take the time to fill out the survey. It’s always helpful to have something concrete to point to when alleging that staff and/or members of Council are disregarding public opinion.

Gurney: I’ll third the cry for more civic engagement, but I’ll suggest that the problem goes further than just JG’s suggested start-point of when the review was designed. It was when the Mayor promised to find hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of gravy while also promising no service cuts. In order to square his own circle he’ll almost certainly need to cut services and if he can cite a citizen review that suggested the service won’t be missed, all the better. I agree with Chris that it won’t buy him a lot of cover. But his voting base was never likely to object to service cuts, anyway. So he doesn’t need much. Besides, sometimes I suspect that politicos go through the motions of public consultation just ’cause. This could be an example of that as much as anything else.

- Matt Gurney is a member of the Post’s editorial board and deputy editor of FullComment.com, the Post’s opinion blog. Follow him on Twitter at @mattgurney.

- Jonathan Goldsbie has no official title at the Post, and so into that void inserts the phrase “Resident Communist.” Follow him on Twitter at @goldsbie.

- Chris Selley is the Post’s City Hall columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @cselley.